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Egyptian Writer Muhammad Ibrahim Mabrouk: Columbus Was Trying to Recruit the Chinese Emperor to the Liberation of Jerusalem When He Stumbled Upon America Following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian writer Muhammad Ibrahim Mabrouk, which aired on Al-Majd TV on April 27, 2009.To view this clip on MEMRI TV, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/2167.htm. "Columbus Wanted to Liberate Jerusalem From the Muslims"Interviewer: "American society was not born and did not grow in the United States. It is a mixed society - a society of immigrants, of different nationalities. How can it be claimed that this society in its entirety was melted down...

By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and other explorers who followed him may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting. Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported....

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University. “We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident...

In Columbus’s day, the Moon was often used to get a rough fix of a ship’s longitude at sea. Columbus was especially intrigued with the idea of using lunar eclipses to determine longitude. If you can note the position of the Moon in the sky from one location versus a known longitude during an event— such as first contact of the Moon with the Earth’s umbra during an eclipse —you can gauge your relative longitude east or west of the point. The sky moves 15 degrees, or one hour of right ascension overhead as we rotate under it. One of...

On the night of Feb. 20, the full moon will pass into Earth's shadow in an event that will be visible across all of the United States and Canada. The total lunar eclipse will be made even more striking by the presence of the nearby planet Saturn and the bright bluish star, Regulus. Eclipses in the distant past often terrified viewers who took them as evil omens. Certain lunar eclipses had an overwhelming effect on historic events. One of the most famous examples is the trick pulled by Christopher Columbus.

In 1491, German cartographer Henricus Martellus created a map of the world that would help Christopher Columbus navigate the Atlantic. Today, the map holds secrets about what Europeans in the 15th Century knew about geography. But unfortunately much of its historic text has faded. But now a team of researchers in the US is using a technique called multispectral imaging to uncover the hidden information that Columbus had at his fingertips. In 1491, cartographer Henricus Martellus created a map of the world that would help Christopher Columbus navigate the Atlantic. Today, it holds secrets into what 15th Century Europeans knew...

The ship that led Christopher Columbus' mission to discover America has been found after 500 years, it has been claimed. A recent expedition has left experts 'confident' a wreck found off the north coast of Haiti is the the Santa Maria. The 58foot ship was the flagship of the expectation, but its final whereabouts have never been known - until now. The Santa María was belived to be a 58 ft (17.7 m) long boat, described as 'very little larger than 100 toneladas' (About 100 tons, or tuns). It was used as the flagship for the expedition, along with the...

An Italian historian has unveiled a previously unknown document that sheds fresh light on explorer John Cabot’s discovery of Canada — a brief entry in a 516-year-old accounting ledger that shows Cabot had financial backing from a Florence-based bank in England and, most intriguingly, may have had prior knowledge of the distant land his famous 1497 voyage would put on the world map. The Italian-born Cabot is known to have sailed from England in search of the New World three times between 1496 and 1498. He is believed to have reached Newfoundland aboard the Matthew in 1497, but Cabot disappears...

The first Briton sailed to the New World only seven years after Columbus, a long-lost royal letter reveals.Written by Henry VII 510 years ago, it suggests Bristol merchant William Weston headed for America in 1499.In his letter the king, right, instructs his Chancellor to suspend an injunction against Weston because "he will shortly with God's grace, pass and sail for to search and find if he can the new found land".Bristol University's Dr Evan Jones believes it was probably the earliest attempt to find the North-West Passage - the searoute around North America to the Pacific. He said: "Henry's...

A GROUP of Welsh Americans are hoping their campaign to reinstate a plaque celebrating the arrival of Prince Madoc ap Owain in the US will overcome its final political hurdle. The plaque was blown out of its position on the Alabama shoreline at military museum Fort Morgan by Hurricane Frederic in 1979. The Alabama Welsh Association (AWA) wants the plaque restored to its original position and last year won the backing of the state’s House of Representatives. Though the motion then stalled in Alabama’s senate the AWA believes a resolution calling for its reinstatement could be passed when the local...

Was Columbus from Chios? Read Matt Barrett's review of the Book by Ruth G. Durlacher-Wolper Christophoros Columbus: A Byzantine Prince from Chios, Greece Was Columbus a woolworker from Genoa or a Byzantine Prince and sailor from the island of Chios in what was then the Republic of Genoa? There has been more written about Christopher Columbus than about any person with the exception of Jesus Christ, and yet his past has been shrouded in mystery. We all have been told that he came from Genoa, a city in Italy and sailed for Isabella and Ferdinand, the king and queen of...

Christophoros Columbus: A Byzantine Prince from Chios, Greece, by Ruth G. Durlacher-WolperCover of the book by Ruth G. Durlacher-Wolper. Over 500 years ago, Admiral Christophoros Columbus stepped upon the soil of San Salvador Island, Bahamas, in the New World, with the banner of the Royal Standard of Spain flying in all its glory. The captains of La Nina and La Pinta followed him off the La Santa Maria, carrying the banners of the Green Cross. Behind them came the weary crew -- men whose faith had weakened during the hard journey, but who had had their faith revived time and...

Was Columbus Greek?Was Columbus a woolworker from Genoa or a Byzantine Prince and sailor from the island of Chios in what was then the Republic of Genoa? The ferry that sails between the island of Lesvos and Athens port city of Pireaus stops at the island of Chios, a few miles off the coast of Asia Minor. If you are traveling from Athens it arrives at four a.m. and unless you are awakened by the change in the rhythm of the ship's engines as it slows down and backs into the quay you won't even know you have been there....

uropeans first came to the Western Hemisphere armed with guns, the cross and, unknowingly, pathogens. Against the alien agents of disease, the indigenous people never had a chance. Their immune systems were unprepared to fight smallpox and measles, malaria and yellow fever.The epidemics that resulted have been well documented. What had not been clearly recognized until now, though, is that the general health of Native Americans had apparently been deteriorating for centuries before 1492.That is the conclusion of a team of anthropologists, economists and paleopathologists who have completed a wide-ranging study of the health of people living in the Western...

Author Gavin Menzies Is Determined to Prove That Minoans Discovered the New World 4,000 Years Ago It takes a brave soul to rewrite history by sailing against current thought. More than 500 years after Christopher Columbus "discovered" America, another seaman is doing just that, entering previously uncharted academic waters with claims that other "Europeans" -- the Minoans -- got there first, thousands of years earlier. Gavin Menzies, 72 years old, is drawing on his experience as a former British Royal Navy submarine commander to prove in a book he is writing that the Minoans were such supreme seafarers that they...

The 15th century explorer who opened up the American continents to Europe was actually called Pedro Scotto - not Christopher Columbus - and his family originally hailed from Scotland, a Spanish historian has claimed. Alfonso Ensenat de Villalonga has disputed conventionally-accepted narratives on the explorer's origins - that he was the son of a weaver in Genoa, Italy, or that he was from Catalonia or Galicia in Spain. In fact, he was from Genoa, but he was "the son of shopkeepers not weavers and he was baptised Pedro not Christopher," Mr Villalonga told Spain's ABC newspaper on Sunday. And his...

One of the most dramatic pieces of evidence for a pre-Columbian crossing of the Atlantic is to be found in a single Latin marginalia, that is some words scribbled into the margin of a book. The sentence in question appears in a copy of the Historia rerum ubique gestarum by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini which was published in Venice in 1477. In that work Piccolomini discusses the arrival of Indians in Europe blown from across the Atlantic at a date when America was unknown to Europeans (another post another day). Next to this passage a reader has written in Latin the...

Excavations at an archaeological site in Bahrain are shedding light on one of the oldest trading civilisations. The site in Bahrain, thought to be the location of the enigmatic Dilmun civilisation Dilmun, one of most important ancient civilisations of the region and said to date to the third millennium BC, was a hub on a major trading route between Mesopotamia - the world's oldest civilisation - and the Indus Valley in South Asia. It is also believed that Dilmun had commercial ties with ancient sites at Elam in Iran, Alba in Syria and Haittan in Turkey. "For 4,000 years this...

Amber and other unusual materials such as jade, obsidian and rock crystal have attracted interest as raw materials for the manufacture of decorative items since Late Prehistory and, indeed, amber retains a high value in present-day jewellery. 'Baltic' amber from Scandinavia is often cited as a key material circulating in prehistoric Europe, but in a new study published today in PLOS ONE researchers have found that amber from Sicily was travelling around the Western Mediterranean as early as the 4th Millennium BC - at least 2,000 years before the arrival of any Baltic amber in Iberia... "Interestingly, the first amber...

Thousands of shipwrecks litter the seafloor all over the world, preserved in sediments and cold water. But when one of these ships is brought up from the depths, the wood quickly starts deteriorating. Today, scientists report a new way to use "smart" nanocomposites to conserve a 16th-century British warship, the Mary Rose, and its artifacts. The new approach could help preserve other salvaged ships by eliminating harmful acids without damaging the wooden structures themselves. The Mary Rose sank in 1545 off the south coast of England and remained under the seabed until she was salvaged in 1982, along with over...